By Bob Allen
“Religious liberty has never been threatened in our lifetimes, and probably in terms of the American experiment, like it will be threatened with same-sex marriage,” Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, warned in a video interview posted online by the SBC Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.
Mohler said the redefinition of marriage “creates a huge problem for the Christian church that can’t accept same-sex marriage within its own definition of marriage, within its own life and within the whole normative expression of what our congregation should look like.”
“It’s going to be, right now, on the front lines people like the florists and the wedding planners, folks like that, who have businesses that are public accommodations, but pretty quickly it’s going to get to just about everyone,” Mohler predicted.
“I think this is where we are going to have to understand that being in the world but not of it is going to require some very keen thinking, some very careful biblical thinking, and we’re going to have to understand that we’re going to have to contend for religious liberty in the very land where we thought it was guaranteed.”
Last fall Mohler made headlines in a lecture at Brigham Young University on threats to religious liberty he sees facing Mormons and Southern Baptists alike.
“I do not believe that we are going to heaven together, but I do believe we may go to jail together,” Mohler said.
In a return visit to BYU Feb. 25, Mohler remarked that since last October “erotic liberty is in the ascent and religious liberty is in peril” and “we may go to jail sooner even than we thought.”
“Twenty years ago, not one nation on earth had legal same-sex marriage,” Mohler said. “Now, we are told that 40 percent of Americans live where same-sex marriage is legal. A sense of inevitablity now hangs over the entire nation.”
“We simply cannot exaggerate the consequence to human flourishing if marriage is subverted and transformed so that it is no longer directed, as a human institution, toward procreation and the nurture of children,” he said. “Human flourishing will be inevitably harmed and permanently debilitated by its redefinition.”